


Once In a Lifetime

by apiphile



Series: spies are merely talking heads [2]
Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carré
Genre: Gen, M/M, Sequel, an inexact portrait of ptsd, author knows a frankly disturbing amount about pain and infection, author knows nothing about geneva, author knows nothing about kiev, author knows precious little about guns, creepily that house is the one my mother grew up in, do not try this at home, dub-con, fight bingo, fight_bingo, i suspect the charactersation of this is completely whack, increasingly nuts narrator, just doing my job fight, not safe sane or consensual, protagonist is a dick, protagonist is also my favourite, public fight, sexual based fight, spies make the worst people, subtle fight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-04
Updated: 2011-10-04
Packaged: 2017-10-24 07:53:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/260883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to "Life During (Cold) War Time": Ricki Tarr really was NOT fit to go to Kiev, and it's a mistake Peter will pay for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once In a Lifetime

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Chris B/inappropriately for Ukranian translation and to Zort/howifall for French translation.

Kiev is, in the places Tarr frequents, slippery with trodden-down snow. In the main streets pathways are swept through like black scars on the temporary white cold hide of the city, but in the back roads that he trudges down, feigning interest in the newspapers with a knitted hat on his shaven head, there has been no such diligence. His trainers lie untouched in a shoebox under the bed in Soho, his feet protesting weakly at the stiff unfamiliar prison of heavy winter boots.

The room he has taken in Kiev has no shower, only a communal bathtub, and as a consequence Tarr has become an accomplished bather-in-basins. The bathtub afflicts the corner of his eye so badly with half-glimpsed ropes of free-flowing intestines that the basins he bathes in are not in the building he fails to sleep in.

Kiev's goal has already eluded him - a middle-aged woman willing to sell what she knows for passage to Paris - or proven a dead end; he fed her rumours to the Circus and found they knew it all already. She's worthless, and he should come in from the cold, but someone is following him, and he wants to draw the bastard out.

At first he's not sure, but Ricki Tarr is not a strong boy because he _doubts_ his instincts. He uses all the old, child’s-play tail-spotting tricks, and the layers of protective irrelevance fall from his pursuer as simply as petals from a spent rose; all it takes is patience.

Tarr stumbles five streets parallel to his rooms, shooting a leg out to steady himself, and brings down the man attempting to pass by him unnoticed.

He apologises – _probaczte_ – and instead of anger the fat little man demonstrates concern, laughs at the slippery pavements, and pats Tarr's arm.

His grip is too tight.

Before he sees the blink-and-miss-it butt of a Makarov in the man's open jacket, he already knows from those clamped fingers on his tricep that he was right.

There are old women on the other side of the street sharing a cigarette between the four of them, a woman pushing a pram with an entourage of three glum-looking children and a large dog.

The fat little spy-catcher with his Soviet gun smiles up at Tarr and in an equally-faked, equally-clumsy ballet of fumbling for something unknown thrusts the muzzle of the weapon into Tarr's side under the cover of their coats.

Later Tarr tells himself what must have happened next:

He must have brought his arm down as hard as he could on the end of the gun, twisting to bring his fist into the underside of the spy-taker's jaw. He surely kicked out at roughly the same time, because that was what he always did, and caught the little man in the side of the knee if he was aiming correctly.

He would probably have tried at least a little to keep the whole show under wraps. Going by the location and severity of the bruising, his follower fought back competently and with force. The spy-taker probably thumped him in the ribs with the butt of the Makarov, which would explain why Tarr has a bruise gradually darkening to the colour of stormy skies over his lower intercostals. There is a strong likelihood that Tarr smashed his diminutive attacker's head into a wall with a shove that made it look as if the man had lost his footing on the pavement; it's a favourite trick of his.

But there's no way to be sure, because the moments between the pressure of Makarov against his ribcage and slowing from a run to a panting trot, his legs tense and his heart pounding, some eight streets away from the confrontation, have snipped themselves from his mind almost immediately. The memory of what is happening erases itself as it is formed.

Tarr slows to a halt and tries to get his bearings. People are looking, but not staring, because staring is dangerous. He regains his breath, and after moving on at a gentle jog for a few more minutes his sense of place returns too.

There is a bloody trail in the snow behind him.

He can feel only the constrictions of his chest; the cold on his face and whatever is bleeding do not trouble him, and in a blank-minded daze, Tarr sits down in the snow and takes his boots off. There is blood on the laces of his left boot, and it stains his fingers.

Without pause, Tarr scoops up a handful of dirty snow and packs it onto his leg at the point where the cloth of his trousers is torn. Ripped, scorched. He does not bother to look at his leg – the bullet has almost certainly only grazed it - and after another minute, when his leg is appropriately numb and the singing in his ears has died down, he throws his boots on the roof of the nearest building, and limps away to find another hotel.

* * *

In the significantly more expensive room he has fled to, Tarr strips and examines the aftermath of a fight he can't recall.

The grey afternoon light traces faint shadows on his face, and Tarr avoids the mirror. He is thinner than he was in Istanbul, growing unpleasantly so. Parts of his body are beginning to sag. This is unimportant: there is a bruise already starting to form in his abdomen. There are marks on his shoulders, on his face, which will become uglier in passing days. There is a scrape across his cheek that looks like the road.

And as the emergency application of snow is undone by the heat of his body, his leg – with a furrow in it he could fit his pinky into, smeared with drying brown-red blood – begins to burn, to scream.

Tarr pours neat vodka onto the wound, his teeth clenched, and swallows misshapen lumps of air between hisses of pain. It stings, but he is almost disappointed by how quickly the pain is reabsorbed into his own wintery numbness.

There's nothing he can do for the bruises – the tender spots that flare in pain when he touches them - and he pats vodka onto the scrapes, the places that his skin must have kissed the cold street, the wall.

Tarr dresses slowly, as if the vodka burns with a cold flame that has numbed him to torpor instead of stinging him. He finishes the rest of the vodka, and settles in an uncomfortably-folded shape by the room's window, ignoring the bed. He should report back. He should slink onto a plane and get away from a city that explicitly wishes to kill him.

He rests his head on the windowpane as a fresh layer of snow begins to fall, and wishes his head empty as the vodka bottle between his thighs.

* * *

Geneva is also snow-bound. The only very slightly reassuring weight of a H&K70 pulls down on Tarr's jacket, rubbing against the denim of his shirt. It does nothing to command a sense of security. There is a man with a piercingly direct gaze and old shrapnel scars in Tarr's hotel and he has been watching him warily.

There are cafes with their chairs in the street, even in the slush the snow has become, and Tarr frequents them, a cigarette burning untasted between his fingers and a coffee steaming, unsipped, on the table. Two plumes of smoke rise like vents from hell, stark against the freezing air.

Tarr's leg hurts. So far there is no sign of any green oozing disaster - it _appears_ to be healing - but the area is too red for comfort. His bruises blossom like a winter garden of dark irises, and there's little he can do to hide them save wear a mask or not leave his room.

He is staring into the shuffling figures on the other side of the street when a blonde woman who is probably taller than him asks in accented French, if the other seat is occupied.

Tarr shrugs and tries to smile pleasantly. He isn't sure how great a success it is, but the blonde smiles at him with the tips of her teeth and sits, her bag at her feet.

"T'aurais pas du feu?" she asks, producing a single cigarette from a case. The case is tarnished silver, with some illegible engraving, "J'ai perdu mon briquet la nuit dernière, trop de vin."

"Mais oui," Tarr says with another costly smile, handing her his lighter from his pocket. He watches her light, the flame throwing temporary shadows on her lower face, and when she slides it back across the slatted table top he leaves it to lie where it is.

"T'as quoi à la gueule?" she asks, illustrating her question with a gesture that involves a lit cigarette – Tarr realises with a stab of discomfort that he cannot see her other hand.

“Pareil que toi,” he says with forced ruefulness, and a touch too quickly, “J'avais trop bu, j'me suis pété la gueule par terre." He reaches down as if to readjust a sock, catches the movement of her shoulder, and manages to deflect the knife blade from entering his knee.

It plunges into his palm instead, and for some reason he curtails the natural howl of pain. It is illogical: she has a vested interested in remaining undetected, that is why there is a knife in his hand and not a bullet in his stomach. The cool-headed, intelligent thing to do would be to yell and spoil her neat little murder.

Instead he closes his fingers – wet with blood and the sweat of pain – around her knife and, the blade still embedded in his hand, tries to pull it away from her.

He is hot on this wintry pavement, on fire with agony his every instinct wants him to stop, but Tarr growls and yanks the blade again and by some miracle she lets her grip slip.

He has many uncomplimentary terms for women he has known: mad, drunk, stupid, crazed – often as a result of knowing him – but never before has Ricki Tarr met a female counterpart to his specific profession, his specialisation; no scalp-hunters he's met wore dresses.

He tugs again, and in a bizarre instant the pain disappears as if a switch has been hit. His body is light and he feels like laughing.

The woman opposite him is a mere dark shape against the gray winter light.

This time the gap is longer. He becomes aware of events unfolding again with his hand palm-up in a gloved hand, surrounded by the smell of disinfectant. He sees, but does not feel past a cold pressure, a curved needle working in and out of his flesh.

His mouth is talking. It says, in unsteady French, that the doctor must know how it is, you have a bit to drink and the sense goes straight out of you; knock the knife off the table, try to catch it before it lands like a proper idiot.

There is no telling if the doctor believes him or not: the ungainly lies lumber past the man, absorbed fully in his work.

It is only when the doctor addresses him as 'Monsieur Trench' that Tarr has any idea what name he gave him.

* * *

Tarr positions himself in the windowsill of his hotel room, a grubby bandage on his hand and his leg aching, and watches rain fall on Paris.

He _should_ go home, although when he started referring to London as 'home' is a mystery. Back to base. And fuck 'should'. He _could_ , given time to find a new passport, go to KL, shack up, drink his hands steady and his nerves firm. There are welcoming women's embraces scattered across the globe, waiting for him. He has kids, here and there, whose simple excitement at seeing his face is not reflected by anyone over ten.

Tarr doesn't have to crawl back to London with a trail of scalp-hunters behind him like blood in the snow. He doesn't _have_ to. He could resign himself to the panic, hit Borneo, hit South Africa, hit Panama. He could sidestep fate and hang on his wits and not crash back to a reprimand and an endless debriefing.

Tarr tries to balance the scotch between his legs, but it falls onto the carpet - fat end first, happily not breaking – and his hands are sweating again.

Of all the places to go to ground to, why go to London? It's hardly familiar. Oh, there's Brixton, but that's tainted, and he knows Malaya like the back of his—

Tarr's laugh is so sudden, so like the demented cackle of a frightened jackal that he falls out of the windowsill, and cracks his knee on the edge of a bed.

There are bedrooms for him in every continent. Until the Irina-Smiley-Haydon-fucked-up-affair, Tarr was greasily immortal. As long as he wasn't actively imprisoned, he could wind through fingers, dodge bullets, slip down back streets. He was _clever_ and _fast_ and fucking handsome and he was _young_ and he was fucking invincible. He _was_.

And now he _is_ , still, shit-scared. He doesn't have eyes in the back of his head. He doesn't know who knows what, and right now he doesn't even have the use of his dominant hand.

Tarr crawls to the scotch on his wrists and knees, and passes his night in Paris on his back, one arm over his face and the other clutching a bottle as a drowning man clutches at floating wreckage.

* * *

London's streets are gray and dirty and windy and wet, but there isn't so much as a sliver of ice on the puddles that form in the gutters. Tarr takes a room in Kensal Rise, far from the exciting centre of the city, and works out an explanation for his injuries that satisfies his new landlord.

The man is in his late forties and as queer as a nine bob note, but Tarr doesn't have the energy to do anything with this information beyond a little vague, directionless flirting that is as easy and second to him as forming a firm opinion based on two minutes of brisk observation.

London is full of drop boxes, and Tarr avoids even walking past the ones that he knows about. He finds a hospital no one he knows of ever uses, and tries to have the stitches in his hand removed.

The doctor on duty takes one pitying look at his face, his sweating, grimacing face, and writes him out a prescription for antibiotics.

Tarr regards it with relative suspicion, but he takes the chit to the nearest dispensing chemist all the same.

He passes the chit to a woman behind the counter in the deserted room, and after reading it what seems like an infinite number of times, the short and pudgy brunette with milk-bottle-bottom glasses says, "You'll have to come round the back a minute," and Tarr begins to check for the location of his H&K.

'Round the back' becomes 'across the back alleyway' and Tarr never gets his penicillin.

A man who walks like a policeman and looks like a mechanic emerges from what seems like thin air, and slaps army-issue handcuffs on Tarr before he registers what is happening.

As is customary he wastes no time on shouts or queries as to what the hell is happening, but tries to drop suddenly to his knees, to worm out of the grip that nearly cuts of his circulation before it so much as nears the pinch of the cuffs. Tarr makes his fall as abrupt as possible, but this ugly man with his rough hands has experience: he just holds Tarr up by his torso until he stops squirming, and shoves him into an Austin Allegro.

There must be a kind of irony in surviving two attempted assassinations on the mainland only to be captured as soon as he comes in, but Tarr fails to see the humour in it. He wants only to live.

As soon as he is inside the car, the stranger with the policeman's gait produces further cuffs, and deftly secures the joint of the first pair to the handle of the passenger door's interior, tethering him to the car. Very belt-and-braces. Caution in excess, although they would probably have done better by sending a second man along, with a gun.

The closer the Austin Allegro gets to Brixton, his unwanted chauffeur humming a Cole Porter show tune, the more Tarr begins to suspect that whoever has picked him up with such ugly efficiency isn't working for the Russians, although this curiously does little to spark any great surge of relief in him.

He briefly wonders why he's not being taken to the Nursery, but his mystery driver has to brake suddenly to avoid an idiotic cyclist, and he only narrowly avoids dashing his brains out on the windshield.

The car is abruptly filled with some heartfelt cursing after the moron on the Raleigh, and only a minute or two later the Austin pulls into a garage Tarr recognises with a subsumed groan. They couldn't have been a little patient? He was coming back in here anyway, sooner or later.

When he is manhandled into Peter's office and shown a chair which he has unusual difficulty in lowering himself into, Tarr is surprised to find himself in interview not with the head of the scalp-hunters, but the head of the Circus. Control. Smiley.

An impenetrably drab man who possesses the talent of making the kind of suits that Peter purchases look like five quid C&A jobs as soon as they are on his person, Smiley blinks at him from behind thick glasses, and inclines his head. "You are becoming an embarrassment, Ricki."

"I did everything I was meant to," Tarr snaps, lapsing into a sullen, sulky, surly silence as soon as he is finished. So he took a little time coming back, so what. It was hardly unusual among the denizens of the Brixton house.

"That's not strictly true, is it," Smiley says in that special tone that's not readily identifiable as either chiding or encouragement.

"Where's Guillam?" Tarr asks, stalling with his cramped and aching hands curled behind his back, still cuffed. He knows he _must_ be in the shit, if he's dealing with Smiley and not Peter, but for the life of him he can't work out which piece of his circulation has engendered the attention of Control.

"Oh, he's within earshot," Smiley assures him.

"Can't get enough of me," Tarr says, uneasily.

"Saving you dental costs," echoes Peter's voice from the corridor.

"What's the jewellery for, eh?" Tarr asks, trying to lift his arms in demonstration and nearly dislocating his bloody shoulder.

"You're becoming a lot worse than accident-prone," Smiley says with another unreadable stare from behind his glasses, "and I would like to talk to you before anyone elsewhere in the Circus demonstrates their disapproval on you."

"You mean before Peter punches my teeth in."

"Peter Guillam is the least of your worries," Smiley says softly. "You have caused a great deal of trouble in shooting that agent, Ricki. A great deal of trouble."

"I didn't shoot anyone," Tarr mutters, something cold flashing through his empty stomach like an electric shock. He shifts nervously in the chair, his hand shooting fresh jolts of pain along his arm.

"You shot Mandyczewski in the face in front of several women," Peter says testily; Tarr doesn't turn but from the absence of echoes he's sure his supervisor has stepped into the room. The soft swish and click of a door confirms it. "He was _supposed_ to make contact—"

"Peter," Smiley shushes him.

"I didn't shoot anyone," Tarr insists. "I can't move my hand."

"Oh no you don't," Peter says grimly, from behind him. "Mr Trench was admitted to Hôpitaux Universitaires de _Genève_ five bloody days after his cover shot an agent in Kiev."

"I don't remember shooting anyone," Tarr says baldly "I didn't have a fucking gun in Kiev."

"With his own weapon," Smiley interjects, quietly.

Tarr catches sight of his own reflection in the window as the darkening skies turn glass into mirror: he looks pale and unhealthy, tired, with red spots flaring in his cheeks as if drunk. His eyes have the wide, staring quality of a rabid dog.

"I don't remember shooting anyone," Tarr repeats, sticking to what he knows. "Why would I lie—"

"Oh _honestly_ ," Peter sighs, directly behind him. "Why wouldn't you?"

Smiley cuts through their spat with a fractional inclination of his head. "What _do_ you remember, Ricki? Why didn't you come back after the no sale?"

Tarr watches his own reflection behind Smiley's head, and Smiley's bored-seeming face alongside it. Peter stands at the wrong angle from the window for Tarr to be able to see his face at all.

"Someone was after me," Tarr mutters, exhaustion making his reply jerky and dislocated.

"Yes you, _arse_ , Mandyczewski—" Peter barks.

"Peter," Smiley says gently. "You decided to draw him out." This is Smiley's way – he addresses questions as statements and vice versa.

"Didn't want to come back empty-handed," Tarr mumbles, a bad impression of humility that wrings a disgusted snort from Peter, over his shoulder.

"Yes, Ricki," Smiley says in a particularly languid voice. "And then it took you a fortnight to come back."

"Souvenir shopping?" Peter suggests, somewhat nastily.

"Busy having my hand stabbed in Geneva," Tarr says in petulant tones.

"You weren't meant to _be_ in Geneva," Peter snaps.

"Needed to get my head together, didn't I," Tarr tells his reflection. "Someone just tried to kill me."

"People are always trying to kill you," Peter sneers, "that is your job, in case it had slipped your mind."

Smiley politely holds up his hand. "Who?"

Tarr shrugs. "Some bloke. Short. Bald. Makarov in his coat, and then in my ribs." He watches Peter, just visible in the window, exchange a knowing look with Smiley. "If you like I can show you what's left of the bruise." He pauses largely for effect. "Or the bullet wound."

"What _do_ you remember?" Smiley asks again, before Peter can call him a damn liar or smack the back of his head.

Tarr does not stint. He begins to sweat profusely in the cold room, his hand and leg to ache, but he is, he tells himself, professional. He tells Peter and Smiley about the dead end, the fights, the missing slices of time, the vodka dressing, the hospital, the names he travelled under, the scotch. He leaves the resurgent blank horror, the patchy sleep, the paranoia that came to nothing, to lie in the shadows of his explanation. Neither of his bosses are stupid. They will see these truths, Tarr thinks, without him needing to uncover them.

Smiley says, "Fawn will be coming with you," into the silence that follows. He doesn't say where Tarr will be going, and God only knows which safe houses are still safe and how things have been rearranged.

Tarr hates Fawn. He has no sense of humour, no known vices, and he moves like a rat. He is a very capable babysitter, and Tarr does not _want_ to be babysat.

When Fawn arrives, the three men are still languishing in their respective reveries. Smiley seems to be asleep with his eyes open, Tarr doesn't risk looking at Peter but he seems to be wandering around his office without purpose, and Tarr finds himself mulling over all the other incidents in his life which arguably far worse than finding an agent from the other side lying in his own guts – have _not_ resulted in him lunging naked at his boss while crying without realising it, or to sizeable gouges being clawed from the flesh of his memories.

He's listened, usually with contempt, to the war stories of Smiley's generation. There was a man who'd remained cheerful through bombardments and murders, mutilating blasts and fragmented kids, who had lost it after watching a cat go after a sparrow on his return. The old soldier – not so old then – had, as legend had it, fallen apart: pissed himself, and passed out. No one would have mentioned it again, with everyone's scars so close to the surface a little lassitude was permissible, but it kept happening. It kept getting worse, until petrified incontinence accompanied every creaking door.

The door to Peter's office vibrates with a gentle rap, but Tarr's bladder stays strong.

"Come in," Smiley says, apparently to the air in front of his face.

"Hello again," Tarr says dismally. Fawn, reflected in the window, is shorter than him and looks like someone tried to breed shadows into human form and then wrapped it in the skin of an unassuming Welshman. Tarr finds him appropriately sinister, although he knows that last time they met he found him a blessed barrier between him and the potential Soviet bullets heading for his face.

Fawn does not answer him, but merely nods to Smiley: Smiley raises his eyebrows at Tarr, and Tarr squirms awkwardly onto his feet without aid. His leg hurts. His leg hurts, but his hand hurts so badly and so consistently that the mask of sweat adorning his face never has a chance to dry fully.

To his surprise, when Fawn ushers him - still handcuffed, but still _armed_ \- out of the office, Peter follows as rear guard. Tarr is temporarily certain, as they descend the tile-walled staircase toward the ground floor, toward the garages, that Peter is only walking behind him for the opportunity to trip him and cause a minor, face-gouging accident in order to vent spleen.

Peter does not trip him, kick him, or punch him in the back of the head. Tarr is not wholly sure how grateful he is for this.

When he is prodded peremptorily into the passenger seat of Peter's flash sports car he understands why the two-man escort is in place: Fawn clambers into the cramped rear seat directly behind Tarr and he knows there is a carefully concealed weapon pointing at some part of him with a steady hand on the trigger.

Peter drives badly, and the safe house – located somewhere in Hampshire – takes far longer to reach than it would have done had Tarr been in the driver's seat. He makes a remark to this effect, but Peter ignores him, and so does Fawn.

The safe house is unfamiliar, gabled and red, set back from the road and surrounded by yew and other coniferous trees. The tires crunch over loose gravel, and spray it across the wide, secluded drive. Hard to sneak up on this place undetected.

"Get out," Peter sighs, and it's the only thing he's said on the entire journey, which has – according to the dashboard clock – taken multiple hours.

"Can't open the door with cuffs on, can I?" Tarr says pointedly. It is nearly dark now, only a faint maroon glow bothering the sky to the west like blood shed below the skin. "Why've you got cuffs on me anyway, I'm not _doing_ anything."

"Shut up, Ricki," Peter says in the same put-upon tone, and he must slip some sort of signal to Fawn, because a moment later the handcuffs loosen and Tarr pulls his arms in front of him, reaching out with his left hand to open the passenger door.

Fawn is already waiting for him, gun nestling in his pocket, no doubt, when Tarr climbs out of the car.

Perhaps he expects Peter to rev the engine of his midlife-crisis car, screech away over the gravel and shower him with small, pointed rocks on his way back to the bright lights and home comforts of London, leaving Tarr to rot in the Home Counties. It's what Tarr thinks he would have done in Peter's position. But Peter turns off the engine, slams the door, and accompanies them both into the house, almost treading on Tarr's heels in that same strange procession as at Brixton.

There are terracotta tiles on the floor, and the hallway echoes. Impossible to walk quietly along this. Tarr follows noisily after Fawn, who is doing his utmost to stride silently in spite of the obvious impossibility.

Tarr ponders the likelihood that Peter has remained because one man cannot remain awake to guard him continually. It is a stupid idea; Peter is the head of Brixton, and it would be more sensible to send a second babysitter than to jerk the head of scalp-hunters away from his duties over something as trivial as Tarr having an allegedly overactive trigger finger.

The stairs have had the carpet ripped from them, and first Fawn, then Tarr's feet sound like a marching army; Peter follows after a lull, out of time with Fawn and Tarr, his strides longer and less weary.

Up in the eaves of the house, separated by a single staircase twists around on itself, Tarr is shoved silently at what he assumes is his room. He has to pass through another room to reach the foot of this private staircase, a room with a bed in which he rather fancies will be where Fawn sleeps.

"Give me a minute," Peter says, suddenly. Tarr has almost forgotten about him, except for the prickling feeling of someone's eyes on the back of his neck.

Fawn looks doubtful.

"Fine, stay down here. Just don't _shoot_ me when I come back down later," Peter snaps, and he follows Tarr into the strange turret room.

It looks very much as if someone has removed the cot from a nursery and replaced it with a single adult bed. The wallpaper is still the suffocating childish pattern of white ducks on a yellow background, the bare floorboards still bear the tacks from where the carpet has been yanked up, and there are hastily-applied bars on the outside of the window.

"This is a _cell_ ," Tarr observes, standing in the doorway.

"Rather thought it looked like a nursery myself," Peter says dryly, from behind him, "but you are damn well staying in it unless you have a guard."

"Taking this all a lot more seriously than—"

Peter clamps his hand abruptly over Tarr's mouth from behind, and says in a conversational tone, "Please shut up." Without waiting for Tarr to nod his assent he continues, walking them both into the nursery, and closing the door softly behind them. "This is extremely embarrassing for me. You were not _remotely_ fit to return to the field, I was wholly _aware_ of that, and I kicked you out to Kiev to get you out of the way."

Tarr nods. Peter's hand tastes of sweat against his lip; Tarr's own hand throbs miserably.

"Now you've _fucked up_ even more than usual. The man you killed - don't interrupt - was an important enough player in the Kremlin for things to be upset over there. You were _supposed_ to make contact and determine if what he had for sale was genuine," Peter mutters. Outside an owl hoots, a fox yips, and clouds roll menacingly across the moon.

"Was I?" Tarr mumbles into Peter's hand. "Might have been nice to _tell_ me."

Peter sighs and releases his mouth, wiping his hand immediately on the eiderdown - as if Peter would despoil his suits with Tarr's saliva, a thought which makes Tarr unexpectedly eager to spit on his waistcoat – with an expression Tarr cannot read but assumes is exasperation or annoyance. "I _did_ tell you."

"Middle-aged woman, Fedorchuk, typist at an embassy," Tarr begins, reeling off the information as if it is printed on the inside of his skull.

"Cover, then meet with Mandyczewski, determine worth of goods, cable back to London and let the Circus send in someone with a little more delicacy come in and handle the important stuff," Peter finishes, watching him. The room is mostly dark, moonlight cutting through the bars and leaving stripes on the floorboards. The cold light catches Peter's small eyes, makes them glint. "I had to fight for you to get that posting," Peter says baldly.

"I don't remember any of that," Tarr says, guarded. He wonders if Fawn would protect him from Peter, or stand aside.

"Your performance in Ukraine and in my office calls my judgement into question," Peter says in a flat, cold voice. "Your execution of an _important_ Soviet agent now puts your life at risk." He sighs. "In the balance, you've probably fucked yourself harder than you have me, but there is still a bloody mess and you have still _fucked everyone_. Even if you _don't_ remember - and I am starting to think, God help me, that you're not lying about that—"

"I'm not."

"—You can at least bloody appreciate how difficult things are, because of you."

Tarr sits on the bed too hard, and tries to massage his bad hand with his good hand, without touching anything that hurts. It is not a successful manoeuvre. He looks up at Peter's red, furious face in the moonlight, closes one eye, and says, "I know how much of it is going to look like your fault."

Peter's chest rises and falls slowly in the dim light, straining against his waistcoat like a corset, and Tarr watches his one visible hand clench into a fist.

"So I have to stay here until—"

"Until Control can work out what to do with you," Peter finishes.

Tarr tries to recall if Smiley had seemed unusually hassled in there interview, but it is like asking himself if deserts seem unusually dry – he has little basis for comparison, as he only ever seems to see anyone from the fifth floor when he's in trouble.

The owl makes an idiotic non-comment on proceedings and to Tarr's disquiet he jumps at the sound, his heart racing.

"What about you?" he asks, squinting at Peter again, a realisation forming as he watches his boss shift uncomfortably in his expensive suit. "You're not here to babysit me as well as Fawn, are you?"

Peter says nothing, and stars out of the barred window. Tarr watches his hand.

"You're here because you fucked up with me and the fifth floor want you away from anywhere you can fuck up anything else," Tarr concludes, with less schadenfreude than he would have expected. He cradles his injured hand and swallows the mouthful of saliva he has generated. "You're stuck here with me."

Still peering out of the nursery window at the thick woods, his equine face bathed in sharp, cold moonlight, Peter says, " _I'm_ not the one whose head is on the line for shooting our man."

"You sent me out there," Tarr says with what he hopes is an impish expression. "It's like a bloke with a badly-trained dog. You don't put the dog in front of the magistrates for biting a kid, you put the bloke who runs him in the dock."

"And they shoot the dog," Peter points out coolly. He leaves the woods to their own ineffable devices and gives Tarr the benefit of an uncomfortably penetrating look. "You're not a dog, Ricki. Don't think you're getting out of this with a rap on the knuckles for being a _bad boy_."

Tarr waves his injured hand sarcastically at Peter. The jolt of pain from the friction of dirty bandages on the inflamed wound makes him flinch, sets the sweat pouring down his face again. "More than a rap on the knuckles, wouldn't you say, Peter?"

Peter wrinkles his nose in evident disgust, but doesn't rise to it.

"It's going to come off," he adds, trying for a detached blandness that he doesn't feel at all. He is cautiously avoiding the reality, internally, of this eventuality: of what it will mean for the remainder of his career, to be a one-handed scalp-hunter with multiple transgressions against his name and no skill for running anyone but himself. He can only repress for so long the panic that accompanies sober examination of his options.

"Don't be so bloody melodramatic," Peter says automatically.

"It's septic," Tarr says with a queasy smile, "infected. Fucking disgusting. Either it comes off or I save Karla the bullets and snuff it."

"Bollocks," Peter says rudely and without sympathy. "Stop behaving like a petulant child. You need penicillin, that's all."

"What do you think I was trying to _get_ when that git in the Allegro shackled me?" Tarr snaps, equally rude. "I'm not a moron."

With a small shake of his head, Peter extracts a plastic pot from his pocket and throws it onto the thin mattress beside Tarr. "All available evidence suggests that you're either an idiot or a candidate for Sectioning," he says pleasantly. The pills are, as Tarr suspected, the antibiotics he was due to collect. "You're of even less use to the Circus dead or ... handicapped ... than you are alive."

"Ha. Ha," Tarr intones, prising the lid off the pot with difficulty.

"You know Bland had a breakdown," Peter says, apropos of very little, his hands behind his back as Tarr gulps a pill down dry. "It's how he ended up on the higher floors."

"Bland's got the mind for it," Tarr sneers, but he sounds more self-pitying than scathing, even to himself. He adds nothing about his own mind, capability for creation beyond the bounds of a preset cover, or lack of it; he stretches out along the bed with his feet dangling uncomfortably over the foot of the frame, and folds his hands over his stomach, good hand cupping bad. The ceiling is cobwebbed, dusty, grey in the moonlight. There is a crack in the plaster in the eaves above his head.

"Assuming you don't end up in a lunatic ward," Peter says, leaning on the wall by the window, his hands ferreting into his pockets – Tarr resumes his vigil of the ceiling's flaws – "You're going to find yourself at the Nursery, training." He sounds as if he's about to say something else, but stops, coughs, and starts again. "It was agreed that you're entirely too likely to do something _stupid_ and potentially dangerous if you're not kept busy."

For an insulted moment Tarr assumes he means 'suicide', but that's hardly likely to endanger the Service; Peter means 'blackmail', Peter means 'defect', Peter means 'Tarr is an overgrown teenager prone to risky tantrums and making demands that cannot reasonably be met'.

"Agreed by who?" Tarr asks the ceiling. "You, yourself, and the dents in your carpet?"

"I'm trying to do you a favour," Peter says irritably. "Christ."

"You're trying to cover your own back," Tarr corrects, "and keep me off it." He tries to worm into the mattress, but it has such paucity of mass that he might as well try to worm into granite. "Not that it isn't _appreciated_ , but you could just as easily ship me off to Malaya with a fat pension and some stocks."

"Which you would squander in six months and then try to blackmail for more, sell secrets, or show up back in London with your begging bowl and your bloody lockpicks," Peter says with annoying accuracy. Tarr risks a glance and finds him staring out of the window again, as if hypnotised. "And before you make some wounded remark about being fobbed off onto another department, that is _absolutely_ what I intend to do, as quickly as I can."

"Thought didn't cross my mind," mutters Tarr, who had been turning it over as Peter spoke. He releases his bad hand, runs the good over the re-growing bristles on his head.

"You're bad news," Peter says, gripping the bars of the window with his forefinger. "I want you out of my bloody hair. I have a whole department full of men getting their hands dirty for their country, and you're presenting a bigger thorn in my side than the rest of them put together."

Considering the malpractice, suicides, stray bullets, missing in action, endless mistresses, and occasional defections from the Brixton house's notoriously unstable employees, Tarr finds this either unlikely or extremely insulting, but he only rubs his head again and bites the inside of his own mouth to avoid digging a deeper hole.

The countryside is far from as silent as the advertising literature slathered on every London wall suggests: a chorus of wildlife breaks the stillness of the air, and in the distance cars on the newly-built motorway grumble and groan in the cold. Down the stairs Fawn is doing _something_ that requires him to move across the squeaky floorboards repeatedly. Tarr closes his eyes, well aware that he's about as likely to sleep through the throbbing in his hand as he is through an air raid or Peter giving in to his poorly-hidden urges and beating him until he's unrecognisable.

"Don't suppose Control knows why you chucked me out to Kiev so quickly," Tarr says. It's not really a question. Peter is not the kind of man to run off to anyone about where he chooses to stick his cock; there are men in the Brixton house who will happily brag forever about every man, woman, boy, girl, and grey area they've ejaculated into, but that's a different territory. They live different lives. Peter is the kind of sexual deviant who sets up house and plays at being normal, and part of the game is to look as realistic as possible.

"No he bloody doesn't," Peter says, and Tarr opens his eyes to find Peter looming over him like a figure from a nightmare, blotting out the knifelike moonlight. "He knows I made a grievous error in my assessment of you and that is _enough_."

"Might as well just tell him," Tarr suggests, closing his eyes again, "you're going to get kicked down the rungs anyway."

He is half-expecting the blow when it comes, but not enough to brace himself or throw up an arm; it is not a punch, but a stinging slap - the kind one gives a hysterical woman - which turns his head to face the wall and knocks the breath out of him.

For a minute he keeps his eyes shut, and listens to Peter's breathing. _You **like** that,_ he observes with what would be gleeful disapproval if he weren't so rattled by the effect it has on him. _Peter, you deviant. You're enjoying this._

Tarr lies immobile on the uncomfortable bed, his face to the wall and his injured hand resting awkwardly on his belly, and mutters, "You might as well go on, it's not like I can defend myself." He makes a show of twitching his fingers a little, and the agony is not worth the point he's making.

"Not giving you the satisfaction," Peter grunts.

" _Me_ the satisfaction," Tarr echoes, twisting back to look up at his red face and blond hair in sweaty disarray.

Peter gestures with his big, horselike head toward Tarr's lower body and sneers, "I'm not blind."

"Stop looking at my fucking dick then," Tarr says with mock-anger. He watches Peter's face, ignoring the tell-tale tightening of his own trousers around the groin as if it simply hasn't happened. Peter's cheeks are still red in the darkness, his mouth is unusually wet, and Tarr wonders abstractly if a blowjob would alleviate the pain in his hand and arm or just confuse it.

"You wear it on your face," Peter says simply, with an undertone that says very clearly what he thinks of Tarr's powers of concealment.

Tarr catches his eye abruptly, humps his back in an obscene movement which does his hand no favours, and says, "Get on with it," as belligerently as if he really is commanding the removal of his hand.

"I am your superior," Peter says curtly, "And you do not tell me what to do."

"Not going to be anyone's superior for long, are you?"

Peter backhands him this time. It is hard, hard enough that Tarr thinks for one awful moment that his eyeball is going to fly out and then for another awful moment that he's still thirteen and receiving the Christian charity of which his father was so enamoured.

"Shut up, Ricki," Peter hisses, hot on the heels of an ear-ringing slap, and his face is almost close enough for Tarr to stretch up and bite his absurd nose. "You will regret this."

"Not as much as you will, I bet," Tarr says under his breath.

The next moment of Tarr's life is filled with such acute sensation that he almost pops clean out of his body: Peter snarls something incomprehensible, seizes the wrist of Tarr's injured hand, and yanks his arm up above his head, smacking the back of his hand into the wall. A pain unlike anything he has ever encountered sweeps down from his hand to his whole body like a white fire burning hot and cold, and Tarr lets out an involuntary shriek; Peter slaps his free hand over Tarr's mouth hard enough to split his upper lip on his teeth, and lies, panting, half-on and half-off the bed, half-on and half-off Tarr's body.

"Don't _push_ me, Ricki," Peter says in a thick voice, dripping sweat onto Tarr's face from above as Tarr bleeds futilely into Peter's palm and wonders if he's going to be able to endure anything further happening to his own palm without actually pissing himself. "I will hurt you."

Tarr might, were he not muzzled with a long, bony hand and the taste of his own blood swilling around his tongue, say something cocky and half-true about being capable of taking much more than that. He might, were he the kind of person who dredged up the past, point out that he was forged in the kind of environment adult men spend their lives trying to avoid. He might mention that he has no fear whatsoever of a former Head Boy with pretensions of respectability and an _office_ and not a single death to his name, but that would be a bare-faced lie.

Instead he extends his bloodied tongue and licks plaintively at the gap between Peter's middle and ring fingers, his eyes open and his vision blurry with pain.

"That's not going to work," Peter mutters, although Tarr has no idea what either of them think he's trying to achieve. He digs his thumb into Tarr's wrist, which makes him screw up his face and bite his tongue as another giddying, unbearable bolt descends his arm.

Downstairs, Fawn appears to have either settled or determined a path through the forest of conversational floorboards which leaves them silent.

"Just do it," Tarr says more weakly than he wants, into Peter's hand. He's not sure how clear he is, and he's sure that even were the hand removed from his lips, he would be slurring.

"Do what?" Peter asks, and he runs his long, bony thumb over the ball of Tarr's thumb. It is a gentle gesture, and on Tarr's _left_ hand would constitute the soft caress of an infatuated lover. On his _right_ it feels as if he is being stabbed all over again, and he gasps for air, for respite, for God.

"Whatever it is that you want," Tarr says thickly, quickly, when he can speak again. It is impossible to focus on Peter's face. He might not be Peter at all. He thinks for an alarming moment that he is hallucinating, that he is still back in the hospital, either in London or in Geneva, maybe even in back in the hotel room in Kiev; that he is imagining everything and will awake from some morphine delusion to a pretty nurse and a glass of water.

"Enjoying yourself?" Peter asks, and he sounds almost angry.

"No," Tarr says, licking his lips as Peter removes his hand from his mouth and settles it on his sternum, between their chests like a barrier. "Not at all."

"Sure about that?"

"No," Tarr repeats.

"Still want me to 'just do it'?" Peter rubs what must be the very edge of his thumb over the dirty bandage on Tarr's hand, and even this barest pressure makes white lights flash behind his eyes. "Still want me to do 'whatever it is that I want'?"

"I don't want to _die_ ," Tarr says immediately, trying to rearrange his legs, the better to lever Peter off him if he needs to.

Peter very, very calmly slings a leg onto the bed and pins Tarr's much broader hips to the mattress as effectively as a nail.

"Stop being melodramatic."

Tarr is not convinced that he _is_ being melodramatic. The pain is astounding. It continues to repeat and retreat from the point which would be harsh enough to knock him out, and render him free of its clutches, and every fresh movement, pressure, or involuntary spasm anywhere near his infected, ruined right hand sends waves of it through him anew.

He is therefore very much not ready for the entirely unpainful weight of Peter's free hand on the crotch of his jeans, squeezing gently the erection that he has, against or possibly _because_ of all the torment, maintained.

"Please stop touching my hand," Tarr says quietly, his mouth dry. He is sure he meant to say 'cock' but he's equally sure he doesn't want that to stop.

Peter regards him with his tiny, flint-like eyes in the near-dark, and says, "Does it hurt?" with something that might be the close cousin of concern, but is not quite a full blood relative of giving a shit. He strokes the edge of Tarr's thumb with one hand, squeezes his cock with the other.

" _Of course if fucking hurts,_ " Tarr gasps, nearly biting through his own tongue as his body goes rigid with conflicting signals.

"Of course it fucking does," Peter says sourly. "Which is why I'm not going to stop touching your bloody hand."

Tarr closes his eyes and tries to concentrate on where his body is. There is probably more to him than the persistent screaming pain in his hand and the vague background pleasure of having his cock stroked through his jeans, but he's not quite able to determine what else; Peter unzips his fly with none of the delicacy he has shown in abusing Tarr's hand, and slips his fingers inside.

The sensation of skin on skin which _isn't_ striking him hard enough to make him see stars is a relief, but not the kind of relief he's seeking.

"Fuck off," he says in a faint voice. Peter, predictably, ignores him.

"Not that I think you'll get the opportunity again," Peter says, his fingers cold against Tarr's cock, his face close enough to his to eclipse what little light there is, "but if you ever fuck things up for me this badly again, I will cut your fucking hand off myself."

He punctuates the promise with an abrupt squeeze of Tarr's injured extremity which is so excruciating that he slips, briefly, from the mantle of consciousness and flees into the comforting blank emptiness.

It barely lasts a handful of seconds, and when he is aware of his situation again Tarr is still receiving tender advances on his cock and violent agonies in his hand. He catches Peter's eye, and tries to elucidate a desire to be kissed, to have something to concentrate his mind on, or to split it further until he can't think, but Peter simply glares at him and pulls his jeans down abruptly.

There is a pause, and when Tarr coaxes himself into looking, looking and _seeing_ , he finds Peter examining the bullet furrow in his leg.

" _That_ healed up alright," Peter says eventually, ignoring the lonely flagpole of Tarr's erection. The unspoken implication is, apparently, that Tarr must have _wanted_ to lose his hand.

"I put vodka and snow on it," Tarr says from between teeth gritted against aftershocks of pain. He thinks something disjointed about being better at mixing cocktails than treating wounds, which apart from being garbled is wholly untrue.

"I'm not fucking you again," Peter says in a low voice, his free hand resting lightly on Tarr's thigh; Tarr tries to reach for his own cock but Peter is in the way and the best he can manage is scrabbling pathetically at his shoulder.

"Then stop prodding my bloody hand."

"I can continue squeezing your wounds providing I _fuck_ you, Ricki?" Peter asks in a mocking voice, "Now that I wouldn't have suspected of you."

"Oh leave me alone," Tarr growls, peevish and too confused and pained to articulate anything else.

"We've been instructed not to," Peter says.

"You weren't bloody instructed to torture me, though," Tarr says. It's not a huge gamble - interrogation is a different department, and one to which Peter is manifestly unsuited for more reasons than Tarr had originally known. Peter is surprisingly heavy for his build, or Tarr is understandably tired; he weighs down on him like a duvet full of lead.

"You're enjoying it," Peter says, turning his head momentarily to indicate Tarr's neglected erection.

" _So are you_ ," Tarr points out. He can feel Peter's cock hard against his thigh, and some part of him not dedicated to short-circuiting in repeat agony is spooling through a crystal clear recall of how that felt inside him.

Very, very slowly, Peter releases Tarr's injured hand and trails his fingers along the length of his arm, raising goosebumps. He places his mouth close enough to Tarr's that their lips almost touch, and hisses (a blast of hot breath against the blood-and-saliva coat Tarr's lips wear), "Do as you're told for once."

Hating himself and revelling in the removal of firm fingers from his fucked flesh, Tarr nods limp assent.

Peter kisses him: again it is the slow, sedate, almost still kiss which seems so unpromising at first but which seems to have barbiturate qualities, mesmerising Tarr's muscles into compliant blancmange.

His hand – Tarr can't be certain but he thinks it the one which tormented his palm minutes before – circumvents his cock, searches between his legs like he's trying to finger a schoolgirl. With a fresh gout of self-loathing and his good hand aimlessly patting Peter's shoulder, Tarr relaxes from the hips down, lets his thighs fall wider apart until the tip of a finger brushes his arsehole.

It goes in dry, a sensation Tarr is far from enamoured of, and he finds a sound escapes him, against Peter's mouth; Peter pulls back and mutters, "Shut up," irritably, leaving Tarr to gape and hiss again at the friction. "Stop being such an infant," Peter adds.

There is no bloody Vaseline. Tarr winces a third time and, above the racket of discomfort and real pain rattling through his nerves, wonders what the fuck is wrong with a blowjob.

Peter withdraws his finger - to Tarr's relief - but only, it seems, so that he can spit on it. He performs this task so close to Tarr's face that he can feel a splash of stray saliva on his lip, and smell _himself_ on Peter's hand. The situation seems suddenly absurd and demeaning, sprawling on this uncomfortable bed with Fawn dozing downstairs and his hand throbbing like a beacon in his mind.

Peter reinserts his finger a little more easily, and Tarr swallows the accompanying throat noise correspondingly.

He shuts his eyes and drifts into the colliding sensations: pain, discomfort, pleasure, frustration, fear, exhilaration, a nagging worry in the back of his mind, pain again, and he tries not to screw up his face when Peter's hair tickles him. It is not like the first time, with the shaking free of lost components and the humiliating whimpers of enjoyment; here he rocks back and forth across a sea of shapeshifting agonies, unable to relax and unable to dispel the fear that something terrible is happening to his insides, to his body.

Peter makes another annoyed sound, and pulls out with a mutter of "For God's sake," that doesn't appear to be especially aimed at him. A moment later he releases Tarr, climbs from the bed, and in the darkness there is a creak of a door and the sound of footsteps. Tarr assumes he is being left alone for the night, and when enough time as passed he takes his cock in his left hand with all the care and tenderness of a jackhammer.

He is left with a handul of come and an ache in his arm - his _right_ arm at that - which he is considering the disposal of when Peter returns with something in his hand and stops in the doorway as suddenly as if he's seen a tripwire.

Tarr regards him with the sleepy stupidity of post-orgasmic lassitude and wipes his palm idly on the wall behind him, in part to see what Peter will do.

What Peter does is frown, throw what turns out to be a tub of Vaseline at him with the kind of over-arm bowl that suggests he's rather good at cricket, and come into the room to sit down on the edge of the bed. Tarr imagines him ransacking the safe house in a feverish hurry, searching the entire building in the dark, in as much silence as he can manage, with an impatient erection hastily thrust back into his suit trousers, and Fawn potentially on the prowl for an intruder.

Tarr starts to laugh.

"Yes ha fucking ha," Peter snaps, hunched over. "Ha ha bloody ha."

Tarr does not stop laughing.

Peter gets to his feet again, his awkward posture and stiff legs as good an indicator as any that he has by no means fought down the remains of his earlier arousal. "This is the last time I let you twist me into doing a bloody thing to you that isn't giving you your marching papers," he says, as stiff in his delivery as his legs are in leaving the room as second time.

Tarr lies back and once again cups his injured and leaking hand in his uninjured and now sticky hand, resting them both on his belly with his cock growing cold. He is sure that, whatever Peter thinks, it is not going to be the last time at all.


End file.
